The same multi-user platform, with a classroom-shaped policy layer on top
SimplyPrint's school features sit on top of the regular user system - so you keep every one of the 168 permissions, every rank pattern, every audit-log entry that a print farm gets - plus a tighter set of defaults built for the way classrooms actually work: a teacher / student split at the rank level, quotas as a permission, queue approval routed to the right teacher, and SSO providers that schools actually run.
Three people, one account, three different logins
User management for schools is mostly about making sure the right person sees the right surface the moment they sign in. Here's what each of the three classroom personas gets, on the same School account:
- Lands on the teacher dashboard at /panel/dashboard
- Pending student prints inbox, with approve / send-back in one click
- Quota top-up requests from her class
- Fleet status for the printers she manages
- Bulletin board author tools
- Lands on the student dashboard at /panel/dashboard
- Drag-and-drop upload zone straight to the queue
- Own prints (queued, running, finished) and remaining quota
- Bulletin board (read-only) and who-to-ask contact list
- No access to slicer profiles, settings or other students' files
- Wires up SSO once, then steps back
- Owns the rank definitions and permission tree
- Reads the audit log for safeguarding / incident review
- Manages domain allow-list and required-2FA on Enterprise
- Doesn't need to log in for day-to-day classroom changes
Bulk invite a roster, or pull it from your identity provider
Three ways to get a class onto SimplyPrint without typing in 30 emails by hand:
- Bulk email invite - paste a list of student emails, pick the rank they should land at, send. Track which invites are still pending and resend with one click.
- Open invite link - generate a shareable URL that lets anyone with the link join at a chosen rank. Useful for printed handouts, the school portal or a class Discord. Lock acceptance to @yourschool.edu so it only works for your domain.
- SSO auto-provision - wire up your identity provider once and new users self-provision the moment they sign in. Map SSO groups onto SimplyPrint ranks so the right people land as teachers automatically.
- Google Workspace for Education - the most common K-12 IdP
- Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) - common in larger districts and universities
- Clever and ClassLink via their SAML connectors - the rostering platforms most US districts standardise on
- Auth0 and any generic SAML 2.0 IdP - for federation-based or custom setups
- Unilogin - first-class support for Danish schools
Teacher vs student: a rank-level split, not a classroom one
On a School account every non-admin user is a student by default. Flag someone as a teacher - manually, in bulk from the users page, or by SSO group membership - and they jump to a different rank with a different default permission set. No code, no separate role to wire up, no per-classroom plumbing: the split lives at the rank layer, so the same teacher account works across every class they touch.
The adapted rank set most school accounts settle on:
- Admin - usually one IT lead and one lab coordinator. Full panel access, rank editor, audit log, SSO config.
- Teacher - approves student prints, manages quotas for their class, edits slicer profiles, sees the teacher dashboard.
- Student - uploads files, queues prints, sees their own quota and the bulletin. Locked out of slicer profiles, other users' files and raw G-code.
- Read-only parent / governor - an open-house rank for parents and inspectors. Sees the queue and the dashboard, can't do anything.
Why teachers need a different surface to log into
A teacher running a class of thirty doesn't want to land on the same dashboard as the student who just queued a fidget spinner. They need a control centre: what's pending my approval, who's run out of quota, which printer needs attention, who's logged in right now. The same URL (/panel/dashboard) renders a teacher control centre for staff and a stripped-down upload-and-queue surface for students - no role-switcher, no separate login, the right view just appears the moment they sign in.
The teacher view collapses the workflow that used to mean three different tabs (queue, users, printers) into a single screen. The student view hides everything a student doesn't need so they can't get lost. Configure both from one settings screen, or turn either one off entirely if your school doesn't want it.
Quotas: not a class setting, a permission on the rank
Quota policies attach to ranks (or to individual users), not to classes. That matters because the natural unit you want to cap is "a student", not "a class" - one student can sit in three classes and you still want them on a single monthly budget. The Student rank caps monthly print-time, filament weight or print count; the Teacher rank inherits an exempt-from-quotas policy; the Lab assistant rank sits somewhere in between.
Quotas are checked at queue time, so nobody sneaks a 30-hour print past the cap - they get a clear out of quota message and a one-click request-more flow that lands in their teacher's inbox. Teachers grant, deny or override from the dashboard widget - usually under 30 seconds per request.
Per-class budgets - giving AP Engineering a bigger material allowance than the intro elective - live on the school classes page. Quotas-as-a-permission and per-class budgets compose: a student inherits both their rank's cap and their class's cap, whichever is tighter wins.
Queue approval: the teacher signs off on every student print
Queue approval is the single classroom workflow that turns SimplyPrint from a print queue into a teacher-gated production pipeline. Every job a Student-rank user queues lands in a pending lane instead of the live queue. The teacher sees the thumbnail, the gcode analysis, the estimated cost and the student's current quota usage on their dashboard, then takes one of four actions:
- Approve - the job moves to the live queue and runs in order.
- Send back for revision - leave a comment with the change request; the student resubmits the same item.
- Deny - with a reason that's emailed to the student.
- Print and approve - approves the item AND sends it straight to a printer in one click, for trusted work.
Every permission, every rank, every audit-log entry still applies
School accounts inherit the entire multi-user system - all 168 permissions, every rank, the full audit log, CSV export, the lot. The school-specific bits sit on top, they don't replace anything.
That means the same patterns a print farm builds (a read-only viewer rank for stakeholders, a slicer-locked rank for new hires, a filament-admin rank with inventory access) work identically on a School account - the school plan just adds the teacher / student split, the school-tuned defaults and the SSO providers schools care about.
What's included with the School plan
The multi-user layer for schools ships as part of the School plan (marketed as Education): 500 users included out of the box, unlimited classes, the teacher / student split, queue approval, quotas, SSO with auto-provisioning and the audit log. No per-seat surcharge, no per-feature add-on.
| Feature / Limit | Free | Basic | Pro | Print Farm | Enterprise | School | Cloud Slicer | Filament Manager |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Included users
Seats included with the plan. School includes 500 out of the box; extra users can be stacked.
|
1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 10 | 500 | 1 | 1 |
|
Multiple users
Real logins for every teacher and student, with per-user history and attribution.
|
||||||||
|
Teacher & student dashboard
Role-aware /panel/dashboard with approval inbox, quota requests and student upload zone.
|
||||||||
|
Queue approval workflow
Every student print routes through a teacher before it reaches a printer.
|
||||||||
|
Quotas as a permission
Cap print-time, filament weight or print count per rank or per user, checked at queue time.
|
||||||||
|
Single sign-on (SAML)
Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID, Clever, ClassLink, Auth0, Unilogin and any SAML 2.0 IdP.
|
||||||||
|
Account audit log
Full timeline of who did what - logins, prints, settings changes, rank reassignments.
|
Want to learn more about our plans?
View full pricing & feature comparisonWhere the rest of the school story lives
This page is the multi-user layer. The other school surfaces:
- School classes - the cohort organising unit: per-class rosters, per-class quotas, end-of-term rollover, SSO class import, the bulletin scoped to one class.
- Teacher & student dashboard - the deep dive on the dual-mode dashboard, every widget, the configuration UI and the preview-as-a-student tool.
- Schools & education (overview) - the broader story: SDPC compliance, the in-product DPA, the Hub kiosk page, district pricing and the budget consolidation pitch.
- SSO - the underlying SAML and Unilogin implementation, with per-provider setup notes.